Kuranui College's socially powerful piece Prisoners has won the top national prize at this year’s Showquest.

Based on the Waikeria Prison uprising which occurred at the start of the year, the storyline follows the journey of a convicted offender from leaving his family at the courthouse to the burning of the prison buildings during the riot.

The piece was entirely student-directed with Anna Laybourn, Sorcha O’Donoghue, Lola Armstrong, Georgina Birrell and Oliver Penman leading the choreography involving over 40 students, and Connor Hislop in charge of creating a fiery video wall using computer generated imagery with a green screen.

Laybourn, Showquest team captain and a cultural prefect at the school, was personally struck by the uprising when she heard about it. She felt there were two sides to the story and believed a change to the narrative was needed to take into account the prisoners’ perspective, leading to a passionate and emotional interpretation of the events.

This is the first time Kuranui has come away with a national title, having been the runners up in the 2019 competition with a moving piece focused on the damming of Lake Wairarapa and the cultural impacts of the event.

This year the South Wairarapa college was awarded the Drama and Choreography awards, and shared the award for Most Effective Use of LED Video Wall with Auckland’s Macleans College. Armstrong also received a scholarship for a week-long experience at the New Zealand School of Dance.

The win is still sinking in for Performing Arts teacher, Karin Melchior. “It’s amazing, the kids themselves can’t quite believe it. You don’t want to hope too much, but I did think after they received the feedback from the regionals that they had a pretty good chance of placing, but you just don’t dare to presume so it was very, very exciting.”

“The leadership team who did the main choreography are really talented kids. The national judges were just so impressed with the maturity of the choreography. It was in-depth choreography based on ideas from a real story, not just a theme.”

The panel of four judges comprised of of Grace Palmer, Rawiri Jobe, Xavier Breed and Fiona Armstrong who described the performance as not only mature, but “technical, aesthetically pleasing, clean and multi-layered”.

“We loved the use of the LED video wall, super slick choreography, and connection between all your performers.”

Melchior believes this is the result of the group’s integrated choreography. “I think choreographing the dancers as a whole with all the dancers made it super slick. It was one piece, not in separate parts, it gave it that cohesion and connection between the dancers. Often schools have separate groups doing separate things throughout the performance, which we have done in the past but this time it made it a much more integrated piece.

“Even though we had lots of Year 9 and 10 students, the leadership team really pushed them up to their limits. They had decided on what they wanted the piece to look like and they encouraged the juniors up to that level rather than just choreographing to that age group.

“They are good at self-directing and are good at working independently,” said Melchior.

Kuranui has consistently punched well above its weight in the performing arts arena and Melchior thinks it may be a combination of being a smaller school, as well as having a perpetually successful environment, where the older students are able to pass down their expertise.

“Kuranui students are just amazing and it maybe because they are slightly isolated being a smaller rural school,” explained Melchior. “I do try hard to get the students exposed to stuff outside of school. I try to get them to performances and workshops with professional dancers from outside the region. I’ve taken them to the dance school in Wellington so they can see the contemporary dance students there and get to appreciate the sort of thing that they’re doing. It’s much more cutting edge contemporary than what they might get to see here in Wairarapa.”

See the award-winning performance here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66woV5LEN64.

Read how the media has covered the achievement:

https://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/arts/125905678/prison-riots-inspire-winning-showquest-performance

Written by Catherine Rossiter-Stead

Article added: Wednesday 04 August 2021